globalvoicesonlinefandomcom-20200214-history
GV FAQ Draft
Frequentlly Asked Questions: FAQ Q: What is Global Voices? Global Voices Online serves as the hub for an international community of bloggers who want to communicate with the broader world. Its main components are a blog, wiki, and aggregator of international blogs. For more detailed information see our about page here. Q: Who runs Global Voices? Global Voices Online lives on a server run by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, which is a research think-tank focusing on the future of the internet and its impact on all aspects of human society. We're based at Harvard University's Law School. It was started by two of the Berkman Center's research fellows, technologist and Africa expert Ethan Zuckerman and former CNN journalist and Asia expert, Rebecca MacKinnon. However we hope that Global Voices will increasingly be run by bloggers around the world. Q: Where did the idea for this project come from? The idea came out of a one-day international blogging conference held at Harvard in December 2004. Many attendees – bloggers from around the world – felt that there needed to be a vehicle like Global Voices to help bloggers from different countries find each other and engage in a global conversation. For more, see our About page. You can also read this account of the GV conference, or listen to this podcast. Q: What are your core values? Our core values are outlined in the Global Voices Manifesto, a document drafted collectively by participants of the GV 2004 conference and many other bloggers around the world. It has already been translated in to several languages, including Chinese, Arabic, and Sawhili. Here are the first two sentences: "We believe in free speech: in protecting the right to speak — and the right to listen. We believe in universal access to the tools of speech. To that end, we seek to enable everyone who wants to speak to have the means to speak — and everyone who wants to hear that speech, the means to listen to it." Read the rest here. Q: What are your ultimate goals? 1. To foster better international communication and understanding between ordinary citizens of different countries, using internet, wireless and radio technologies. 2. To develop and refine the free, open-source social media tools necessary to make goal #1 happen more effectively. Q: What are your political and religious orientations? Global Voices Online strives to be non-partisan and non-denominational. We welcome all people who believe in the importance of protecting and promoting freedom of speech for all human beings on this planet. We think that free speech is threatened by a wide range of ideologies and religions in different countries - and that it is also being defended in different ways by people of many different religions and political persuasions. We don't care what political party or what religion you belong to if you agree with our core values. In fact, we are actively seeking participation from people who, while believing in our core values, represent a wide range of political parties and religions. One thing, however: we are against hate, we are against racism and bigotry, and we are against violence and terrorism. We will avoid linking to bloggers who we think fall under this description. Q: I'm a blogger. How can I get involved? There are lots of ways, outlined in detail on this page for bloggers. Q: I'm a journalist. How can Global Voices be useful to me? Lots of ways. Check out our special page for journalists. Q: How are you funded? Global Voices Online is a non-proft project. Different aspects of the project are being funded by grant monies obtained by the Berkman Center from the MacArthur Foundation, the Open Society Institute, and others. Q: What's your relationship with Mainstream Media? It's very positive and mutually beneficial. The international community of blogs found in our aggregator, index and daily world blog roundupsand other feature blog posts are a rich resource for journalists to find out what bloggers in various countries are talking about. Fairly often, we find out that a blogger who we had linked to recently on the blog got interviewed by a media organization. Usually there's no way to know whether there's a direct connection or not, unless the journalist tells us they found a blogger through Global Voices, but we suspect that at least 50% of the time the sequence of events is not a coincidence. Q: How do you decide what to put in your Daily World Blog Roundups? The roundups are evolving over time as we get more people involved. When we started doing them here's how it worked: The person writing the roundup on a given day goes through the aggregator of world blogs and picks out a selection of what he or she thinks are the most interesting posts that tell you something you can't get from reading the mainstream international media. This is a very inexact process and much good stuff inevitably gets missed due to a combination of factors: the individual's personal interests, personal failings and lack of adequate time or brain power. In other words, we are all human and the perfect roundup would take more time, knowledge, wisdom, and intelligence than any one person can possess. Because we understand how impossible it is for one person to do a good blog roundup for the entire world while sitting in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA (or wherever we happen to be traveling at the time), we are in the process of dividing up the daily work: according to region, amongst a group of bloggers – most of whom do not live in the United States and are not Americans. It will take us a while to sort this out and find the right people who are willing to put in the time. But rest assured, the roundups will improve. Q: What if I think you missed something important in the day's roundup? Please post the link in the comments section at the bottom of the day's post. We welcome everybody to do this as much as possible. Q: What if I want to share my views about some of the items you posted, or some of the blogs you linked to? This is great! We welcome your views, insights, and information. To share them, all you need to do is hit the "comments" link at the bottom of the post containing the information or links you want to talk about. Then type whatever you want. Q: You made a mistake (e.g. broken link, wrong link, misspelled someone's name)--who do I contact to fix it? Then it's very important that you let us know, either by posting a comment or by emailing us at: globalvoices DOT online AT gmail DOT com. Q: Why are you writing your email that way? In a futile attempt to avoid spam from non-humans. DOT= . AT = @ Q: I wrote a great post in Basque|Kazak|Mongolian|Fijian that addressed the very issue you were talking about in a post. Why didn't you link to me? Unfortunately, in our stupidity our team does not include people who speak those languages. If you'd like us to link to something we are unlikely to be able to read, please translate it into English, French, Spanish, Portugese or Chinese and post it on your blog. Then please send us the link at globalvoices DOT dailylinks AT gmail DOT com. Q: Can anybody post a comment? Yes. Please do. However we do moderate the comments to keep out spam, pornography, or hateful speech. So please don't be angry with us if it takes a few hours for your comments to appear – especially if you post your comment when the administrator is asleep! Q: What if I want to suggest some links for the next roundup? We hope that the international blogging community will help us compile the daily roundup by sending us as many links as possible. Just send them to: globalvoices DOT dailylinks AT gmail DOT com. Q: Suppose I know of a blog that I think would be perfect for GV. How do I suggest it? The best way to do this is by posting the link to that blog in the Bridgeblog Index. Click here for more instructions about how to do that, and to get more ideas about what we're looking for. Q: When you link to something are you endorsing it? When we link to something we're saying: this is interesting and is worth reading. We do not have the resources to fact-check every blog post we link to. We do not believe that any one piece of information or analysis from any single source should be unconditionally believed by the reader (or listener or viewer). This goes for works by professional journalists as well as the work of bloggers. We encourage you to approach all information on all blogs – including Global Voices – with skepticism until you get to know the background, biases, and inevitable human weaknesses of the people writing the blog. Also, we often link to things which we as individuals may not agree with. We link to it anyway for one of several reasons: - We think that a blogger's viewpoint, analysis or information is useful in understanding how people in that person's country think. - We think it provides unique information or analysis we haven't seen anywhere else, which a significant number of Global Voices readers will find interesting or thought-provoking. Q: Have you checked the backgrounds of the bloggers in your aggregator? Over time, we are hoping to do this. Right now, we are familiar with the backgrounds and identities of some of the bloggers, but not all of them. Q: What if a blog in your aggregator is written by somebody who isn't really who they claim to be? Please let us know. Post a comment on the blog or email us at globalvoices DOT online AT gmail DOT com. Q: Do you link to anonymous blogs? Do you include them in your aggregator and why? The answer to both questions is yes. The reason for this is that in some countries it is very dangerous to speak the truth if you are not anonymous. We encourage bloggers living under regimes that do not respect freedom of speech to use our anonymous blogging guide. We do try to find out as much as we can about anonymous bloggers we link to, and sometimes communicate with them privately, in confidence, with the understanding that we will not release their personal information to the public without their permission. If we can verify that the anonymous blogger really is in the country they say they are, this enables us to link more confidently to their material and vouch for their authenticity. In the case of blogs from democratic countries where the bloggers' lives and livelihoods are not endangered by speaking their minds, we generally consider anonymous blogs to be less credibile. However there can be exceptions to this due to a blogger's employment circumstances and the specific content of their blog. Q: What's the deal with the Wiki you guys are using? Wikis are a tool invented by software developer Ward Cunningham, designed to let a group of people jointly edit a web page. We use wikis to do a great deal of planning and coordination of Global Voices projects. Specifically, we use wikis for joint authorship of documents like the Guide to Anonymous Blogging, and for the Bridge Blog Index, because they allow anyone with relevant knowledge to help us improve and expand these documents. You're welcome to help us improve any of the documents being written on our wikis. We're especially grateful for help with the BridgeBlog Index, since we'll never develop a rich picture of global blogs without lots of help from around the world. You should create an account on our wiki before adding your content, and you may want to read this guide to adding content to wikis. There are hundreds of wiki software packages availbable. We use MediaWiki, the tool developed by the Wikimedia community to support Wikipedia and related open content efforts, both because we like it and because we're fans of the Wikimedia projects and efforts. We're not actively involved with development of the wiki software - if you've got issues with how the software works, you should get in touch with the MediaWiki development team. Q: Why is the Global Voices wiki trying to sell me sleeping pills or pornography? Because anyone can add content to a wiki, people edit wikis for all sorts of reasons. It's an unpleasant but common practice for people to delete the content of a wiki page and replace it with advertising content. This is called wiki spam, and while it's very hard to prevent people from doing it, it's very easy to undo the damage. We invite you to learn more about wikis and "roll back" damage you see to the Global Voices wiki. But if you see a page of our wiki replaced with links about pornography or illegal drugs, we haven't changed our focus - we've been spammed, and we'd appreciate your help in cleaning up the mess. Q: What's the Bridgeblog Index? The Bridgeblog Index is a listing of blogs from around the world, organized by the country or region a blog focuses on. Unlike other indexes of blogs like Globe of Blogs, we're trying to build a catalog just of "bridge blogs", blogs designed to increase communication between people from different countries and cultures. A blog written to explain local politics, events and culture to a global audience is a bridge blog; one written exclusively for a local audience or for just family or friends probably isn't a bridgeblog. While the Global Voices team at the Berkman Center has added some of the content found in the Bridgeblog Index, we're not the main authors - hundreds of contributors who've taken time to add content to the Index. You're invited to help us improve the index by adding great blogs we may not have already found to the index. Because the index is a wiki, it's very easy for you to add links yourself. Or you can use the contact form to let us know about blogs you think should be in the index. Q: What is a bridgeblogger? A bridgeblogger is someone who uses her weblog to increase understanding between people from different countries or cultures. Bridgebloggers sometimes are people who write about their home countries for a global audience, like Jeff Ooi in Malaysia, Issac Mao in China or Big Pharaoh in Egypt. Often they're expatriates, like Hossein Derakshan, who writes about Iran from Canada, or Ory Okolloh, who writes Kenyan Pundit from Cambridge, MA. And sometimes bridgeblogs are written by people who are passionate about another culture, even though they have no ethnic link to that nation - your hosts Ethan and Rebecca both fit that description. Not every blog written about politics, global cultures or current events is a bridge blog. A blog about Basque politics, written in Basque for a Basque audience is probably not bridging between cultures - a blog about Basque politics written in Basque and Castellano might well be. A blog written by Basque and Castellano speakers to encourage communication between the two groups certainly would be. Q: What's the Global Voices Aggregator and what's an aggregator anyway? An aggregator is a tool that combines content from multiple weblogs, allowing you to read several blogs on a single webpage, or using a single piece of client software. People who subscribe to lots of blogs often use aggregators to make the task of reading those blogs more manageable. The Global Voices Aggregator is a tool we use to keep track of several hundred of the most frequently updated bridgeblogs we know about. We use the Aggregator to put together the daily roundups you see on our weblog. Because the aggregator we use is web-based, you're welcome to use it to keep track of weblogs in a particular country or region. Q: Are you endorsing the blogs that you put in your aggregator? How do you choose them? We put certain blogs in our aggregator because we find it useful to read those blogs on a near-daily basis. In that sense, we're endorsing those blogs as "interesting to us". We are not endorsing them as authoritative, correct or accurate, nor are we endorsing the views held in those blogs. Blogs make it into the aggregator one of three ways: - Someone adds the blog to the Global Voices Index. We think it's especially interesting and subscribe to it. - We get an email suggesting we link to a particular blog or blogpost, and we subscribe to it. - We're researching an area of the globe unfamiliar to us, and we discover new blogs we want to follow. Blogs are most likely to be added to the aggregator if they: - Are frequently updated - Represent a point of view rarely seen in mainstream North American/European media - Are well written - Are written in a language one or more of us reads well (English, Chinese, Spanish, French or Portuguese.) Q: Why isn't New Zealand Weasel News (or your blog of choice) included in the Global Voices Aggregator? There are two possible reasons for this. It's possible that we don't know about the blog - in which case you can let us know about it by using our suggestions form, or by adding it directly to the Bridgeblog index. It's also possible that we know about the blog, and don't feel compelled to read it every day. In countries where there are lots of bridgebloggers, it would be impossible for us to read all the blogs we know about - we focus on voices we think are especially interesting, underrepresented, entertaining or poignant, and we try to switch blogs in and out of the aggregator so we're encountering new voices. It's our hope that the Bridge Blog Index - which everyone can contribute to - will be vastly larger than the Global Voices Aggregator, which will probably remain under 500 blogs so that a single editor could - theoretically - keep up with all the traffic on the aggregator. Q: Why don't you include US blogs? Because lots of other sites - BoingBoing, Metafilter, Slashdot, Daily Kos, Powerline - do. You can read them - and you probably do - if you want to keep up with US politics, techology or other widely-blogged subjects. One of the reasons we started the Bridgeblog Index and the Daily Roundup was to call attention to voices that are rarely heard in newspapers or newscasts. It's our general sense that US politics, perspectives and current events are pretty well represented within the blogosphere and don't need the promotion an effort like Global Voices can offer. Q: Do you include non-English blogs? Absolutely. The Bridge Blog index lists blogs written in dozens of different languages. The Global Voices Aggregator largely contains blogs in languages that one or more of us can read. We're lucky to have the help of great blog translators like Ndesanjo Macha, who helps us keep track of blogs written in Kiswahili, and we're always looking for help doing roundups in languages we don't speak well. If you're fluent in English and a language we don't cover well, and if you're doing roundups of blogs in that language, please let us know - we'd love to link to you. Q: What about tagging systems? Are you suggesting any del.icio.us or Technorati tags? We think tags are really cool and we're using Technorati and del.icio.us tags to identify and index bridgeblogs. If you'd like to help, please tag blogs you think we should pay attention to with "globalvoices" and the nation or culture they primarily focus on. We subscribe to the RSS feeds for the del.icio.us and technorati "globalvoices" tags and will see your suggestions. Q: What's that IRC thing you link to? IRC is "Internet Relay Chat", an old-fashioned but surprisingly powerful text chat system. Because most of the people who work on Global Voices don't live in the same city, we use our IRC chat room as our virtual office. There's a good chance that some of the people who work on Global Voices will be in our IRC channel - #globalvoices on irc.freenode.net - at any given moment, and a very good chance that someone will be there between 7am and 3pm GMT. Please drop by and say hi, or ask us questions about the project. If you're new to IRC, you might find this introduction to IRC useful. Q: What are these podcast things you guys keep talking about? "Podcasting" is a form of blogging using audio files. Instead of posting text files on a blog, podcasters post audio files. Sometimes these are as simple as someone talking into a microphone; in some cases, they're as well produced as professional radio content... just like blog posts, which can range from journal entries to complicated essays. You can subscribe to podcasts using tools like iPodder, which are basically audio aggregators. You're welcome to subscribe to our podcast feed - we're striving to produce at least one new podcast per week. Q: What is this Skype thing you guys keep talking about? Skype is a software program that lets you have voice conversations using your computer and an internet connection. Skype lets you talk to other Skype users for no cost other than the cost of internet access. It also lets you make calls to a traditional telephone for a modest fee. There are dozens of tools - some software programs, some hardware devices - that allow conversations through "Voice over IP" or VOIP - Skype is one of the most popular. We don't have any relationship with the company that makes Skype - we're not being paid to hype the product. If you're from Skype and would like to pay us to hype the product, please email us at globalvoices DOT online AT gmail DOT com. Q: So what's Skypecasting? And how do you do it? Skypecasting = Podcasting + Skype. We use Skype to call bridgebloggers around the world, record the conversations on our computers and release the results as podcasts. Ethan uses a piece of software called Audio Hijack Pro to capture audio from Skype, and edits the audio in Audacity, an open source audio editor. Rebecca uses ___ and ___ on the Windows platform. Q: Since you're headquartered in the U.S., what's your relationship with the U.S. government? We have no relationship with the U.S. government, other than trying not to violate its laws. We receive no money from the U.S. government or any other government and have no plans to do so. We receive no instructions from U.S. government officials and do not welcome instructions from any government. Q: How can I be sure you're not part of some CIA plot or something? Well, if you insist on believing that we are, it's unlikely we will ever convince you otherwise. All we can do is give you our word that we really, really aren't. Q: On the other hand, how can I be sure you're not part of some anarchist plot communist plot or facist plot or terrorist plot or fill-in-the-blank plot? Please see above. Q: What's the difference between Global Voices and other grassroots media projects like Indymedia? We know Indymedia and respect them, but they represent a certain part of the political spectrum. Our goal is to be much more inclusive: we respect and welcome the voices of conservatives, libertarians, liberals, radicals, and various others – many of whom refuse to be pigeonholed and categorized by political movements. Q: What other groups are you allied with? We have a close relationship with the Open Society Institute and receive funding from the MacArthur Foundation. We have shared goals with many groups including: OurMedia, Creative Commons, the Internet Archive, Digital Divide Network, the Committee to Protect Bloggers, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the International Freedom of Expression Exchange, Reporters Without Borders, the Media Bloggers Association, and Human Rights Watch. Q: I have a complaint about the way the site works, and a suggestion to fix it. What should I do? By all means please contact us: globalvoices DOT online AT gmail DOT com. Q: I'd like to donate funds to help Global Voices grow. How can I do that? Thank you very much!!! We welcome your help. Please email us at globalvoices DOT online AT gmail DOT com. Q: I have other questions. Who do I contact? Feel free to post a comment at the bottom of this page with your questions. If you're a member of the press and would like to contact bloggers we've linked to or anybody else involved with the project, please email us at globalvoices DOT online AT gmail DOT com.